Day 7: Simulation on Mininet

So far we have discussed various topics: SDNs, Network Security issues like DoS, DDoS, Ransomware and Distributed controller architectures. From this week onwards, you guys can expect all of this knowledge being put to use. The problem statement we would be working on is - 'Detecting and Preventing DoS and DDoS attacks on Distributed SDN Controller Architectures'. The chosen problem statement is a beautiful cusp of three domains: SDN, Network Security and Machine Learning. The previous posts was to equip ourselves with the required knowledge to be able to start working on the above problem statement. From now on, we shall start implementation and learning parallely. Right now it may seem like all posts were just disjoint points on the graph, but slowly we shall join these dots to arrive at something good.

In one of the previous posts, we discussed the various distributed SDN controller architectures. Now, it's time we devise our own to start the first phase of implementation - simulating the given below architecture using Mininet. We shall not achieve this today, but we shall take it one step at a time, start with mininet basics and throughout the week work towards simulating the architecture.

But first, let's look at the architecture that is going to be the subject of our experimentation.


Features of the architecture:
  • Mesh network of distributed controllers to enable all controller - controller pairs communication
  • Controller 1 is a Master Controller that keeps the mapping of all controller - switch
  • Master controller is also responsible for switch migration while load balancing the controllers and thus becomes a part of a virtual network of all switches (another possibility is to have another instance of a virtual switch)
  • Master controller is not one static controller and can change dynamically by introducing database redundancy throughout all controllers (alternatively, master controller could be static if the architecture is tweaked to avoid single point failure on master controller)
  • ML server is responsible for detection and prevention of security breaches by interacting with master controller
 For simulating the above architecture, we should familiarize ourselves with the simulation platform - Mininet. I recommend you to try out few basic topologies today using the help of this link.
There is very little information on how to create topologies with many controllers in mininet. Here is a very interesting article that shows a step by step process to achieve the same using two methods.
For more details on mininet, you could refer to this as well.

Comments

  1. Ram P RustagiFebruary 2, 2019 at 1:07 AM

    Architecture diagram is not visible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ShravanyaFebruary 2, 2019 at 7:51 AM

      Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HsJhby53GGfXGCQkGroe8ksZ0RivhKL1f0IcyHFH_a8/edit?usp=sharing

      Delete

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